Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museums

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve (Day)?

Many museums schedule plenty of holiday events in December, but probably not for New Year’s Eve. So the message from the Currier Museum (pictures) in Manchester, NH, caught my eye. It was for something called “Noon Year’s Eve” on Dec. 31, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. I think that’s a grand idea–the association between museums and holidays is a good one, in my mind.

Manchester, New Hampshire, Currier Museum of Art,Here is the description of the Currier event:

Northern New England’s biggest family-friendly New Year’s Eve event gets better every year. Ring in 2015 a few hours early at the Currier Museum of Art’s third annual Noon Year’s Eve party! Wrap up a day of celebrations with bubble-wrap fireworks and a huge balloon drop. Enjoy fun art-making activities, face painting and live entertainment. We’ll have a scavenger hunt around the galleries and you can take in the mind-bending blockbuster exhibition, M.C. Escher: Reality and Illusion. Enjoy all sorts of kid-friendly food, hot cocoa and more. Dress in your party best and celebrate the New Year at the Currier! Cheers!

A longer description is here. Tickets, which cost $19 in advance for adults and $22 at the door ($10 and $13, respectively for those 17 and younger), go on sale on Dec 1. The museum says it has drawn about 600 people in each of the two previous years.

Does your museum have a noteworthy New Year’s Eve event? Please leave a comment about it below if it does.

By the way, I still laud the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for remaining open 365 days a year, including for Thanksgiving dinner, which started in 2010. At this writing, Thanksgiving dinner this year is sold out. But there’s room for the Christmas dinner as of today.

Breaking News: Don Bacigalupi Leaving Crystal Bridges

BacigalupiDon Bacigalupi has been president of Crystal Bridges only since February, 2013, but now he is leaving to become the Founding President of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which George Lucas intend to erect in Chicago. It is not without controversy. The recently released design concept, put forward by MAD Architects, has been criticized. People don’t approve of its “space-mountain-like design.”

Still it has a proposed opening date of 2018.

Previously, Bacigalupi was director of Crystal Bridges, and I’m not sure anyone ever understood that reassignment. His most recent venture, which took a vast about of his time, was curating State of the Art: American Art Now.

About the Lucas: A group called Friends of the Parks on Thursday has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the plan.

According to Reuters:

The museum was to be located on the same area on Lake Michigan as Soldier Field, Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium. The proposed site currently is used for parking lots.

The lawsuit seeks to block the transfer of the land from the city to the museum. By allowing the development, the suit said the nation’s third-largest city will interfere with the right of citizens to “use and enjoy property held in trust by the state of Illinois as a natural resource and pristine physical environment.”

…”The structure will interfere with keeping the lakefront clear and free,” [Cassandra Frances, president of the Friends of the Park] said.

Bacigalupi, who joined Crystal Bridges in 2009 from the Toledo Museum of Art, will remain a member of the Crystal Bridges board.

Mass MoCA Closes In On Its Original Promise

“It’s really exciting to see a lot of the promise of that project being realized,” Michael Govan told me the other day. I was telling him that, tomorrow, the Massachusetts Museum of Contempory Art plans to announce six new partnerships with artists and artists’ foundations that will fill 90,000 square feet. That’s a huge chunk of the new space being renovated in the expansion that I wrote about in August for The New York Times.

TurrellMass MoCA’s new partners are big names: James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, plus the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Easton Foundation of Louise Bourgeois, and Bang on Can, which is handling the late instrument maker Gunnar Schonbeck. And Govan, now director of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, was there at the creation of Mass MoCA, along with Tom Krens, who usually gets credit for the idea, and Joe Thompson, its first and only director.

I write much more about tomorrow’s news in an article posted a short time ago on the website of the Times, headlined Vast Space and Art to Fill It: Mass MoCA Partners With Major Contemporary Artists. It will be in tomorrow’s paper.

With these partnership, Thompson has taken Mass MoCA a turn away from its early years–when it curated its own exhibits and usually commissioned or helped create new artworks on site. But these partnerships, which are not common and may be unique, or close to unique, seem a sound way for Mass MoCA to expand at low cost.

For its first two partnerships, with Yale Art Gallery and the Hall Art Foundation–for exhibitions of art by Sol LeWitt and Anselm Kiefer, respectively–Mass MoCA incurred little added costs, mostly things like security. The YAG and the Hall picked up the other costs.

Mass MoCA is cost-sharing on three of the new deals–with Rauschenberg, Easton and Bang on a Can. Turrell will donate one or two works–they are site-specific. But Mass MoCA plans to raise money for the Holzer and Anderson installations, and most of Turrell, too.

The slight danger here for Mass MoCA in displaying such masters is that it loses its identify as an “art factory,” as the headline on my summer article put it so well.  It will still curate its own exhibitions–in fact, that aprt of the museum is gaining space too.

“It was always posed as an alternative place, not trying to be a regular museum,” Govan said. On the other hand, he added. “Mass MoCA was always supposed to be flexible and to be changing with the times, and it is.”

 

Detroit: Someone There Is Listening

Remember the political ruckus over the pay packages in the last years for Graham Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Annmarie Erickson, his deputy?

Local politicians threatened to repeal the millage tax, which is supporting operations at the DIA for the next ten years, because of it. Even though I thought that the pair probably deserved the raises and bonuses as disclosed, I agreed that the optics of them–at the particular time, with the Grand Bargain hanging in the balance–had to be fixed. And I recommended a way out:

lbp_home_bioWay back when, you may remember, some rich board members of the Museum of Modern Art supplemented Glenn Lowry’s salary with their own funds. Mike Bloomberg did the same for some members of his mayoral staff. Perhaps that is what can happen here.

Now, it seems, the DIA board has listened to the complaints and changed the optics, at least somewhat. According to the Detroit News:

Directors of the Detroit Institute of Arts on Tuesday repaid the museum $90,000 as reimbursement for bonuses awarded to three top executives in 2013, according to a memo sent to suburban authorities this week and obtained by The Detroit News.

Apologizing for making “mistakes which we regret,” but emphasizing there was “no wrongdoing of any kind,” board chairman Eugene Gargaro wrote that the DIA directors were contributing the money to end a very unfortunate situation.

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson (pictured), who’d criticized the pay packages, was assuaged. The News said he felt the board had learned a lesson and was satisfied that “this mischief won’t continue.”

Earlier this week, the DIA reported that 21 local Japanese businesses, all members of the Japan Business Society of Detroit, had pledged nearly $2.2 million to the DIA, about $1.6 million of which will go to the $100 million the museum must raise for the Grand Bargain. The rest will go to reinstalling the Japanese collection in a new gallery. Details here.

That takes the DIA’s fundraising total to about $87 million for this effort.

“National Gallery” — The Film

Oddly, so soon after I wrote here about “Mr. Turner,” the British film about J.W.M. Turner, I just learned about a British documentary called “National Gallery” about that august London institution. It, too, was shown at last spring’s Cannes Film Festival and it’s on view in New York City from today through Nov. 18. It’s at the Film Forum, which describes it like this”

NatlGalleryFilmLondon’s National Gallery…is itself portrayed as a brilliant work of art in this, Frederick Wiseman’s 39th documentary and counting. Wiseman listens raptly as a panoply of docents decode the great canvases of Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Turner; he visits with the museum’s restorers as they use magnifying glasses, tiny eye-droppers, scalpels, and Q-tips to repair an infinitesimal chip; he attends administrative meetings in which senior executives do (polite) battle with younger ones who want the museum to become less stodgy and more welcoming to a larger cross-section of the public. But most of all, we experience the joy of spending time with the aforementioned masters as well as Vermeer and Caravaggio, Titian and Velázquez, Pissarro and Rubens, and listen to the connoisseurs who discourse upon the aesthetic, historical, religious and psychological underpinnings of these masterpieces.

Now, the film is 181 minutes–very long for a documentary on one institutions, and even one by 84-year-old Wiseman, who uses a fly-on-the-wall technique, never straying into interviews, voice-overs or identifiers.

But, and this is where I learned of the film, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis on Wednesday called it “magnificent…at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.” And that’s just the first paragraph.

Dargis goes on to say that Wiseman delves into the NG’s history (including the slave-trade origins of a founder’s fortune) and, to her, the very important role played by money concerns at the NG. She concludes:

…the experience of watching “National Gallery” is pleasurable and immersive because he’s a wonderful storyteller. It is also unexpectedly moving. Because his other great theme is how art speaks to us, one he brilliantly expresses in the relay of gazes that finds us looking at museumgoers looking at portraits that look right back — at artists, art lovers and moviegoers — even as Mr. Wiseman, that sly old master, looks at all of us in turn.

Last May, the Telegraph also wrote a very positive piece, including the words:

The real joy of his film is that it never needs to strain for effect; it sits back. It’s like being lulled with intelligence. However long it is since you last climbed the gallery’s steps, you’ll watch this truly inspiring piece of work and rue the interval.

 The Guardian didn’t like it as much,

I have not seen the film, and though I hope to I’m not sure I can get to the cinema before Nov. 19. Perhaps it will move somewhere else in New York.

Meantime, here’s a short trailer.